Director, SEO & AI Discovery

Responsibilities

• Define and execute CubeSmart’s organic growth strategy across digital properties, facility pages, and local search experiences to drive customer discovery, engagement, and acquisition.
• Develop and champion a long-term roadmap in partnership with IT, prioritizing initiatives based on strategic impact, customer value, implementation effort, and expected business outcomes.
• Establish governance for intake, prioritization, documentation, and decision-making to ensure resources are focused on the highest-impact initiatives.
• Build and evolve CubeSmart’s in-house SEO capabilities, establishing the strategy, processes, and team expertise needed to drive organic growth while leveraging agency partners for targeted consultation and specialized support.
• Lead CubeSmart’s AI discovery strategy, defining how the brand appears across AI Overviews, generative search experiences, and LLM-driven discovery channels.
• Monitor shifts in consumer search behavior, including the rise of zero-click and AI-mediated discovery, and quantify the impact on organic visibility, traffic, and customer acquisition.
• Define and operationalize what “AI-ready” content, technical SEO, and structured data look like for CubeSmart, ensuring our digital ecosystem is optimized for emerging search experiences.
• Evaluate and pilot AI-powered SEO tools and automation opportunities that improve efficiency and scalability, balancing innovation with practical business value.
• Define and lead CubeSmart’s local organic discovery strategy across its full store footprint, ensuring customers can easily find, evaluate, and choose the right storage solution in every market.
• Evolve and own CubeSmart’s local discovery strategy to account for changing customer behaviors, including AI-powered local search experiences, map ecosystems, and emerging discovery channels.
• Connect local discovery performance to customer acquisition outcomes, partnering with Marketing, Operations, and Analytics to identify opportunities and measure impact.
• Partner directly with the technical SEO and engineering resources embedded in IT to translate business priorities into a shared implementation roadmap.
• Establish a strong cross-functional operating rhythm with IT, including planning, prioritization, and progress reviews, to ensure SEO opportunities are aligned to business goals and delivered effectively.
• Sit alongside and partner with the Director of Content & Social Strategy as a strategic planning partner, ensuring SEO and AI-discovery insights influence content strategy, channel planning, and campaign development from the earliest stages of ideation.
• Integrate search intent, customer behavior, and AI discovery insights into content planning to inform topic selection, content formats, optimization priorities, and publishing strategies based on how customers search and how AI platforms surface information.
• Develop a shared approach to building authority and visibility across traditional and AI-driven search experiences, recognizing that content quality, structure, distribution, internal linking, social engagement, and external signals collectively influence discoverability.
• Establish a collaborative operating rhythm with Content & Social, including planning sessions, performance reviews, and optimization discussions, to ensure content creation and amplification strategies are informed by SEO and AI discovery opportunities.
• Share content performance measurement ownership, so both teams are accountable for the same visibility and engagement outcomes, not separate scorecards.
• Define the measurement framework, KPIs, and reporting approach that provide visibility into SEO and AI-discovery performance — combining traditional indicators such as organic visibility and rankings with emerging signals like AI presence, share of voice, and downstream customer acquisition impact.
• Establish a structured experimentation program that turns insights into action through clear hypotheses, prioritized tests, measurement plans, and documented learnings that continuously improve organic performance.
• Monitor changes in search behavior, algorithms, competitive landscapes, and emerging discovery platforms, translating insights into actionable recommendations and strategic opportunities rather than passive trend reporting.
• Connect organic discovery and digital experience optimization by ensuring SEO, AI discovery, Web, and CRO strategies work together to improve the customer journey, from initial search through reservation conversion.
• Lead and develop the in-house SEO team, building the capabilities, processes, and expertise needed to scale organic growth internally over time.
• Own the SEO agency partnership strategy, including budget management, scope definition, performance accountability, and ongoing evaluation of what capabilities should remain in-house versus where external expertise adds value.
• Build the accountability structure, clear owners, and clear metrics.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience leading enterprise SEO or organic growth, including at least 3+ years in a strategic leadership capacity.
• Direct experience with multi-location, franchise, retail, real estate, or hospitality SEO — you understand the difference between a single-site strategy and one that spans hundreds of local pages.
• Hands-on experience adapting SEO strategy for AI Overviews, generative/LLM-driven search, or semantic search.
• Strong command of SEO measurement, analytics, and technology platforms, including: GA4, Adobe Analytics, Google Search Console, and at least one enterprise SEO platform (e.g., BrightEdge, Botify, Conductor, or seoClarity), and technical SEO tools like Screaming Frog.
• Track record building governance and measurement frameworks from scratch — not just operating inside an existing system.
• Demonstrated success partnering with IT/Engineering.
• Experience managing agency or vendor relationships, including budget ownership and performance accountability.
• Experience with website optimization and experimentation, including partnering with CRO, analytics, and digital teams to improve customer journeys and conversion outcomes.
• Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to translate complex SEO and AI-search concepts into clear business strategies, investment cases, and measurable outcomes.